The North Korean Nuclear "Threat"

But the nuclear threat part was always problematic. The idea that they would attack a US ally with nuclear weapons never was the issue. It's only when you want to attack them or overthrow their regime, that the deterrence aspect of nuclear weapons enters into the picture. It would be suicide for the North to ever use those weapons. However that is how one defector described it, a doomsday machine that would go into effect, if North Korea was successfully attacked and "decapitated."

The more substantial issues are achieving a more or less permanent security arrangement in the area, managing great power competition on the peninsula and in northeast Asia, avoiding nuclear proliferation, managing the Korean nationalist movement for eventual unification, and resolving and preserving Japanese security in the face of lingering Korean and Chinese resentments against Japan and its territorial claims.

Robert Carlin has noted that a request for a withdrawal of US forces from the area has been notably absent from North Korean demands lately. It is the nature of those forces and what they are doing that is the issue.

Now that the North Korean demand is seen as not having war exercises with forces of strategic significance on their doorstep, practicing the destruction of North Korea, the response from the Pentagon advocates is, "What about China?" This is the real issue in the region, and always has been, great power competition for hegemony in the area. Not too far removed from the historical situation in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.